Opinion: Moving Pictures

Phil Hawkins maps the changes in how Australians have consumed their favourite movies…
Known as Nickelodeons in the USA, in the early twentieth century, thousands of people filed into movie theatres to see a mixed bag of entertainment – live musical performances together with short silent films produced quickly and regularly. In rapid succession, colour was introduced, then sound, then Technicolor. The so-called 'Golden Age of Hollywood' reached its zenith in the nineteen thirties and forties, even as Europe went to war. Cinema went on to provide a valuable information source during World War II, as newsreel footage was refreshed frequently.
The mass appeal of television in the forties – and in the fifties, colour television – saw the first shot across the bows in the battle for consumers' entertainment needs. You could watch your newsreels at home, and in Australia, also comedies imported from Britain and dramas from the USA. Yet cinema attendance remained stubbornly unchanged. They still offered a great night out, thanks to a much more immersive experience.
In the nineteen seventies, Philips, Sony and JVC released competing versions of the video cassette recorder – happy days! You could now record a TV show while racing off to the movie theatre to watch something else. Then sales of prerecorded video movies and later, video rentals were popularised from the eighties. You'd have thought this would have been the death knell for cinema, but it wasn't…
When DVD was released in 1997, home theatre amplifiers became more digital and more complex, and our TV screens swelled laterally. Surely this type of digital movie experience would keep people in their homes rather than driving to the multiplex cinema? Maybe a little, but initially, DVD discs were sold rather than rented, and software rollout in Zone 4 Australia was torturously slow for the first year or so. Then digital television arrived, and later Blu-ray discs, yet the needle barely moved.
Finally, streaming services beginning with Apple's pay-per-movie and then monstered by Netflix and others, began to lower cinema attendance per capita. In the USA, 1.22 billion tickets were sold in 1995, yet by 2019 the number had hardly grown to 1.23 billion – roughly the same number of attendances in a growing population. After the global pandemic brought the cinema industry to a screaming halt for three years, attendances are now at about two-thirds of pre-COVID levels.
The parallel I wish to draw here is that your local audio-video specialist store is like a movie theatre. As a type of business, it has weathered the technological and demographic storms of the last decades, and faces multiple threats…
First, there's 'big retail'. In Australia, the success and expansion of JB Hi Fi and Harvey Norman stores have provided the 'store near you' benefit to consumers looking in particular for large screen TV, low-to-mid home theatre audio equipment, headphones, accessories, and limited ranges of speakers. There has been a real-world decline in the number of specialist retailers around the country particularly in regional cities, but also in the suburbs. But at the same time, category killers taking on audio and home theatre like Myer Megamart, WOW, Clive Peeters and Dick Smith Powerhouse all came and went.
For the specialist retailer, the solution has been to compete on factors like range, service, exclusive brands, store personality, expertise, and so many more. Longevity is important too, as if I drive down to the nearest specialist store from my house, I'll wager that three-quarters of the staff were there five years ago, and half of them ten years ago.
Then there's installation and services – the rise of custom installers and system integrators has been commonplace in the US, Europe, and Australia. There's a demand for small companies that can provide structured cabling for your home build or renovation, install HVAC or smart lighting, and source and install a premium home cinema room with all the accoutrements. They have lower operating costs than a retailer – high labour costs but very low or negligible costs for premises, utilities, inventory and marketing. In the USA, most specialist retailers in the major cities have showrooms that are service-based centres rather than product range showcases, and some hybrids of both.
Specialist stores in Australia got onto this trend many years ago. For example, many of the founding members of CEDIA, the industry association for installers, were in fact, retailers. So, as well as having fully stocked showrooms, they have staff and experienced contractors who can design, plan and deploy complex home theatre installations – with the ability to demonstrate to the public what you're getting for your money.
Online is another challenge. Compared with other major markets, Australia has never had a pure online leviathan for the AV sector, such as Crutchfield in the USA. We've had Kogan.com, and then the mass retailers have developed click-to-buy over the years, complementing their hundreds of shopfronts. Amazon launched in Australia in 2019 and, by all accounts, has done well in taking share away from larger retailers, especially solutions-based products such as wireless speaker systems, low-end components, headphones, accessories, and the like.
It has been the willingness of the specialist retailer to embrace digital marketing that has been transformative. By March 2020, any retailer without an active e-commerce platform was sunk. At the start of the lockdowns, you could have been forgiven for thinking many of these small businesses would go to the wall. But of course, stuck in our homes with money to spend, consumers bought online from these retailers that normally thrived on touch-and-feel and the in-store experience.
Coming out of this pandemic has also sent crowds back to stores, both in person and still online. On one of Melbourne's big retail highways, Bell Street, Preston, RIO Sound & Vision just officially opened what they say is "the world's largest AV showroom facility". Theatre at Home, founded in Sydney, opened on Whitehorse Road in Melbourne's east, and other locations in Adelaide, Central Coast and Castle Hill. A retail revolution? Maybe not, but we're seeing an evolution that will benefit discerning readers and prospective buyers – and movie theatres still haven't died yet!
Visit your local Specialist Retailer

Marc Rushton
StereoNET’s Founder and Publisher was born in England and raised on British Hi-Fi before moving to Australia. He developed an early love of music and playing bass guitar before discovering the studio and the other side of the mixing desk. After writing for print magazines, Marc saw the future in digital publishing and founded the first version of StereoNET in 1999.
Posted in: Retailer News | Hi-Fi | Headphones | Home Theatre | Visual | Smart Homes & IoT | Industry
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